Can AI come up with scientific theories of past when provided with sufficient data available at that time?
Yes.

Some good examples of this are Lipson's work using evolutionary models, and Wu &amp; Tegmark's work on a theory-based life-long learner, and Iten et al.'s work with deep neural networks. There are many, many, other research papers in this area, and there is a lot more work that is ongoing. The endgame for a lot of this work is the hope that we can synthesize new theories automatically.